Science in society, Incentives and obligations

Written by Rob Davies

NoteOverview

This week we work so that we are able to reflect critically on how we practise science communication

  1. The representation of credibility, uncertainty, and generalizability
  2. The role of story telling
  3. The use of clear or persuasive language or visualizations
  4. The ethics of practice in science communication

You can navigate to each in the side bar on the right.

Lectures

Interactive lecture – This week, we reflect critically on science communication

You can watch the lecture videos using the playback windows shown next. The lecture is broken into three parts.

  1. Science in society: incentives and obligations — what we are going to do
  2. Reflections on recommendations for how we do and how we represent science
  3. The complex link between science and story telling
Tip

During the lecture, I suggest some questions you can think about. Reflecting on your responses to these questions will help you to learn.

You can download the lecture slides as a .html file you can open in any browser.

The slides end with a references list but don’t worry about reading what’s in the references list, we give you recommended readings in Section 2.

Tip

The slides presented in the next videos can be downloaded as a web page: research-policy-society.html.

When you download the file, double click on it to open it in your usual web browser for viewing.

Next, you can see the lecture elements. We recommend that you watch them in sequence.

  1. Science in society: incentives and obligations (~5 minutes). We have reflected on science, theory, and hypothesis testing. We now need to reflect critically on practices of communication in science.

  1. Reflections on recommendations for how we do and how we represent science (~27 minutes). We consider forms of doing and representing science that are identified as credible, sources of uncertainty and how we can present that uncertainty, generalizability, the limits on generality, and how we should represent those limits, the incentives that operate on us, and our obligations and responsibilities.

  1. The complex link between science and story telling (~15 minutes). We discuss how and why we tell stories, to ourselves and to others, we examine the link between research and policy, we look at persuasive language and we return to the questions we can consider as we try to find a balance between our ethics and our practices.

Reading

TipEasy access to readings

All reading is accessible via the library.

  • Essential: We expect you to be familiar with these reading. You will be assessed on this.
  • Recommended: We highly recommend these readings. They often provide a different perspective, or explain things in a different way.
  • Optional: Further readings for those interested.

This week, the reading is optional but Recommended:

Bartscherer, S. F. (2026). Cultures of Trial and Error: The Narrative Side of (Open) Science. https://doi.org/10.36850/448e9a73-75b2 Recommended

Corneille, O., Havemann, J., Henderson, E. L., IJzerman, H., Hussey, I., Orban de Xivry, J.-J., Jussim, L., Holmes, N. P., Pilacinski, A., Beffara, B., Carroll, H., Outa, N. O., Lush, P., & Lotter, L. D. (2023). Beware “persuasive communication devices” when writing and reading scientific articles. eLife, 12, e88654. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.88654 Recommended

Yarkoni, T. (2018, October 2). No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you. [citation needed]. https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/ Recommended

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